Andrew Carnegie : Iron ore :: Mark Zuckerberg : ???
Illustration by Jason Lee, NY Times
“If iron ore was the raw material that enriched the steel baron Andrew Carnegie in the Industrial Age, personal data is what fuels the barons of the Internet age.”
Alessandro Acquisiti, a behavioral economist from Carnegie Mellon, researches how people value their privacy in online data, how willing they are to part with it, and for how much. (In a delicious coincidence, his last name means “acquired” in Italian!)
It turns out that there are some surprising results of his studies. Although “consumers insist that they treasure their online privacy…, their mouse clicks tell a far different tale.”
The article, “Letting Down Our Guard With Web Privacy,” by Somini Sengupta in the NY Times, March 31, 2013, explains how people often reveal more online than they intend.
